On 09/20/2013 07:54 PM, Felix Janda wrote:
John Spencer wrote:
musl itself does not use the man-pages project currently, as the
majority of manpages are very glibc specific. so the posix manpages
project is _imo_ currently a much better documentation for the
interfaces provided by musl.
On the other hand the section 2 man pages from linux-manpages documenting
Linux specific behavior of system calls might be useful, no?
indeed.
however, my interest in having the POSIX manpages use portable nroff
syntax comes from my endeavor to build a non-bloated musl-based linux
system, which will, at least in the basic configuration, feature the
below nroff-only manpage viewer, since groff is incredibly bloated (over
4 MB of compressed source code! - in comparison my man.c compiles to a
60 KB statically linked binary) and written in C++ so it's definitely
contrary to my goals. (not to talk about that some of the groff features
like the tbl preprocessor are just horribly misguided and completely
unidiomatic, introducing a completely new language namespace)
as such i'd love to see the POSIX manpages project actually deliver
portable manpages, instead of assuming that the full-blown GNU userspace
stack is available.
Could you give a definition of this portable nroff syntax?
i have a hard time finding detailed specs, but the commands implemented
by the manviewer are sufficient to display 75% of all manpages on a full
desktop sabotage linux install with 8000 manpages without a single
unknown command, despite a lot of packages using their own special
format. for example anything xorg related uses "XMan", anything
BSD-related mdoc, and perl manpages use again another set of commands.
so this here seems to represent a very common subset:
{"\\\"", 0, 0},
{"nh", 0, 0}, /* This program never inserts hyphens */
{"hy", 0, 0}, /* This program never inserts hyphens */
{"PD", 0, 0}, /* Inter-para distance is 1 line */
{"DT", 0, 0}, /* Default tabs, they can't be non-default! */
{"IX", 0, 0}, /* Indexing for some weird package */
{"Id", 0, 0}, /* Line for RCS tokens */
{"BY", 0, 0},
{"nf", 0, 1}, /* Line break, Turn line fill off */
{"fi", 0, 2}, /* Line break, Turn line fill on */
{"sp", 0, 3}, /* Line break, line space (arg for Nr lines) */
{"br", 0, 4}, /* Line break */
{"bp", 0, 5}, /* Page break */
{"PP", 0, 6},
{"LP", 0, 6},
{"P", 0, 6}, /* Paragraph */
{"RS", 0, 7}, /* New Para + Indent start */
{"RE", 0, 8}, /* New Para + Indent end */
{"HP", 0, 9}, /* Begin hanging indent (TP without arg?) */
{"ad", 0, 10}, /* Line up right margin */
{"na", 0, 11}, /* Leave right margin unaligned */
{"ta", 0, 12}, /* Changes _input_ tab spacing, right? */
{"TH", 1, 1}, /* Title and headers */
{"SH", 1, 2}, /* Section */
{"SS", 1, 3}, /* Subsection */
{"IP", 1, 4}, /* New para, indent except argument 1 */
{"TP", 1, 5}, /* New para, indent except line 1 */
{"B", 2, 22}, /* Various font fiddles */
{"BI", 2, 23},
{"BR", 2, 21},
{"I", 2, 33},
{"IB", 2, 32},
{"IR", 2, 31},
{"RB", 2, 12},
{"RI", 2, 13},
{"SB", 2, 42},
{"SM", 2, 44},
{"C", 2, 22}, /* PH-UX manual pages! */
{"CI", 2, 23},
{"CR", 2, 21},
{"IC", 2, 32},
{"RC", 2, 12},
{"so", 3, 0},
the alternative is to apply the tbl preprocessor before shipping the
manpages and instead include the preprocessed output (cleaned up from
groffisms as well)
I'm not sure if your man can handle the output of tbl. Attached is the
output when run against one of the tables in pax. It looks rather
hopeless. Also the fictional script cleaning up the GNU tbl output is
likely going to be dependent on a specific tbl version.
For eqn it seems much more likely to me that one can produce output
which makes your man implementation happy. The equations are already
hacked to make them better suitable for nroff.
i agree that the output of tbl is even worse...
btw my research on http://www.troff.org/papers.html revealed that tbl
and eqn preprocessors existed back in the troff days, so this seems to
be a historical mistake rather than groff's fault ;)
as for the other groff specific formatter commands, i am refering to
Felix' response: all of them can either be left away or in case of tbl
and eqn the preprocessed source used instead.
.ce remained open. Is there an alternative or could you just implement
that?
yes, that can easily be implemented as a nop on my side, without losing
valuable information.
--JS
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